w2wtal – starting over

We invite to a group-meeting at Café ADA on Saturday, February 4, 20:00 CET to get to know each other and to exchange our views.

welcome2wuppertal has been quite quiet for some time. We have continued our monthly breakfast at Café ADA (every third Sunday of a month from 11:00 CET) and also our „Deutsch-course for all“ took place, although it was reduced a littlebit (see informations in the sidebar). However other activities were withdrawn after our initiative to bring refugees to Wuppertal via the European relocation program was rejected by the City-Council. The reason for this wasn‘t this local failure, which was no surprise to us, but rather a multitude of other reasons, which can essentially be found in a catching process of learning on our part. In addition, there was a normal change of a group whose activists recently have begun a new life in our city. Many of our friends are now our neighbors or our colleagues.

If someone wants to see this, it could be seen as a social success. Unfortunately, one and a half year after the „summer of migration“, there is a completely different perception in the focus of media and politics – driven by a paranoid and phantasmagoric narrative of failure and overburdening. This has led to very worrying political developments. Everybody could have known this when we spoke during the local Liberation festivity in April 2016 about the anniversary of Evian’s disgraceful conference, where Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany were denied a global salvation. Nevertheless – the fact that more than 5,000 people who died on the borders of Europe 2016 just were a little notice at the end of the year, was a kind of shock.

The treatment of people who flee to Germany now has almost reached a level that reminds of bad times twenty years ago. Unfortunately, we have to say that it even looks darker in many parts of Europe and the world. It didn‘t need a Donald Trump to see this. A large part of the world seems to have agreed on looking at migration only as a problem for the refuge countries and a deadly sea or walls seem to be good solutions. In view of this it‘s almost astonishing that the German society seems stable somehow.

Although the massive dying in the Mediterranean and really intolerable conditions in Greek or Serbian Refugee-Camps are driven out of people’s mind as good as possible, a clear majority of the population still supports a reception of refugees and, according to a recent poll, over 80% of the German population reject the US-ban for people from seven muslimic countries. However, this is hardly reflected in public discourse. This discourse is devoted almost exclusively to one-fifth of the population, which is „right-wing populist“ approachable and which in fact always had racist attitudes. The so-called „Heitmeyer studies“ of recent years have proven this proportion seriously.

It is to be feared that this shift of public discourses will be pushed even further this year – towards racist attitudes and restrictive legislation. The discussions about the massive Racial Profiling by Cologne police during New Years Eve were a little taste for this. The forthcoming elections in NRW and Germany and the elections in France and the Netherlands are threatening to increase the hysteria of social discussions, accompanied by a cynical and an inhuman policy to calm down the furious racists – with more and more deportations, extensive deportation custodies and more racial profilings.

Our task is to stand together against it.

For this reason, w2wtal wants to try a restart at the beginning of an important year. As an initiative from Wuppertal, a city, which is often misused by xenophobes and Nazis as a negative decal for their sick delusions, we feel a special responsibility to defend our way of living in „the Greyzone“. Together with our friends we will have to place different images and narrations into the discourse. Also it is neccessary to introduce the effects of a hysterical election campaign to people who have recently come to Europe and who are not used to it. Last but not least, there’s a need to build up structures of protection together.

To tackle this challenge, w2wtal needs new comrades – people who live in this town for a longer time and newcomers to Wuppertal. We need new friends who are interested in political developments and who want to find strategies for the defense of our coexistence. We have agreed to meet a second time a month to get to know each other and to exchange our views on politics. For the first time we meet this Saturday (February 4) at 20:00 CET at Café ADA, Wiesenstraße 6 in Wuppertal-Elberfeld.

welcome2wuppertal (w2wtal) is an initiative of people who live here for a longer time and newcomers to our city. Together we want to build up self-organized and real soldary structures, which enable all people to participate and decide about our living. Get involved, come along and join us! If you have any questions, please contact us via E-Mail (use our encrypted formmailer for sensitive content), if you want to get informed about our next meetings, please inform yourself via our channels at Facebook, Twitter or telegram.

We try to support a self-empowerment of people who came to us. Being affected by a one-sided legislation and an often racist practice, newcomers have to become political participants on their own in a new social environment. w2wtal wants to help to improve the conditions for a political participation as independent actors of our city‘s society.

Since 2015 we support refugees in visiting a self-organized Deutsch-course. Our main goal was the idea to offer a language-course for all people, without looking for their papers and without paying attention to whether someone is living officially in our town. We still find this very important. After two years of Deutsch-Courses at Café ADA, our course moved to a new adress, where we offer two courses a week again.